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Sunday, March 14, 2010

This post comes from the annals of history. From before I found out I have Celiac Disease, before
I started getting my mood and anxiety in check by eating gluten free, before I started fiddling around with gluten free cooking and (more excitingly) gluten free baking.
So here is an indulgence for me. Gluteny and Delightful Orange Sponge Cupcakeswhich I took from Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough's "The Ultimate Cook Book" which I still enjoy using. The recipe is actually for a cake, but I really wanted to make something in cupcake form.

Orange Sponge Cake:

- unsalted butter or nonstick spray

- 1 cup flour

- 6 large eggs

- 1/4 tsp. salt

- 1/2 tsp. cream of tar tar

- 1 cup sugar

- 2 Tbsp. orange zest

- 1 Tbsp. thrawed frozen orange juice concentrate

Set the oven to 360F and separate the eggs. In one bowl, mix the egg whites and salt on medium and mix until foamy. Then add the cream of tartar, mix on high until your mixers make peaks, just like when you make whipped cream. Yum! Except for don't eat this. I tried. Don't. You can even do this a little closer to the end since my egg whites just sat around for a while.

With clean and dry beaters, and a second bowl, beat your egg yolks and sugar until they're nice and oozy. The book states, 'the ribbons [of mixture] will drizzle onto the batter without immediately dissolving back into it' which was a really good gauge. Mix in the orange zest and thawed orange juice concentrate.

(mmmm, really delicious to taste test at this point)

Fold in the flour until it had just blended, and now add half of your lonely egg whites to the mixture. Blend these in and then add the second half. Pat yourself on the back for finishing the batter!

Now for the fun part. I use a 1/4 measuring cup and scoop cake batter into my baking cups which are placed in my muffin tray. I generally fill the cups all the way to the top so that the end product has a perfect cupcake 'babybump'. I can't remember how long I cooked them for, but I'd say it was around 20 minutes (never forget to do the toothpick test)

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Well, I just got a nasty surprise that any food lover just starting a food blog would hate to hear. On February 22, I got a letter from my doctor saying my blood screen for Celiac Disease came back positive. So now I'm on a gluten-free diet, unable to bake my old favourites of poppyseed lemon muffins and banana bread.

And I'm on a quest to continue my food blog. Let's call this motivation to stay on the straight and narrow to avoid gluten.